2013 Honda Odyssey minivan — boxy and bland, but it does haul a lot of people and things.

Why is it that minivans have such a stigma attached to them? When people talk about the cars they want, snazzy names like Corvette or BMW or Lexus are bandied about, but you don’t hear anyone saying, Gee, what I really want is a van. Pity about that. Maybe it’s an image thing. Maybe it’s the fact that most of them look like a big rolling box. Again, it’s a pity.

After a week with a 2013 Honda Odyssey minivan, I thought, now here’s a car that does everything it’s supposed to do and then some. It’s a people hauler – the Touring Elite model we tested will carry eight people; it’s a cargo hauler – with the third row of seats sunken into the rear floor, you have 93 cubic feet of space. Even with the third row up, you have 38 cubic feet, more than twice as much as a big sedan’s trunk. It’s comfortable – there’s enough cabin space in this car so everyone has enough foot room and head room and wiggle room. The first and second rows of seats are adjustable fore and aft and their seatbacks go up and down.

It’s the un-SUV

As a marketing matter, the ad agencies have effectively given up on minivans. They’re marketed to families and that’s about it. The factories are trying to sell them to the few families that won’t buy sport utility vehicles. The van is the un-SUV. It doesn’t have the SUV’s off-road/on-road bully-boy cachet. It doesn’t have that car-like/truck-like ambience, that frisson of masculinity. The minivan is just so much white bread, a bland box with its engine kind of hidden somewhere vaguely in the front. It doesn’t really say anything. It just does.

So what does it do? The Odyssey’s interior is riddled with practical little things that almost require a catalogue, an interior designer’s list of what to put in there, what to feature. The car’s two second row power-operated side doors open and close on parallel sliding tracks. The switches for these doors are on the left side of the dashboard (allows the driver to control the doors), on the B-pillars (so the second-row passengers can open and close them) and on the key fob.

Figuring that whoever’s riding in this van will be drinking something or other, Honda has put 11 cupholders around the interior – I like the three in the fold-down armrest in the second row – a number of bottle-holders and cubbies in various parts of the doors or the side wall moldings. The ceiling holds a 16-inch-wide pop-down DVD screen and a control apparatus for watching movies. On the dashboard, the Touring Elite has a full navigation screen and controls for the 650-watt audio system with its 12 speakers scattered around the car. The center console has a voluminous box under the armrest (the kind of box that will get filled with gas station receipts, fast food wrappers and other trash) and the captain’s seats have their own fold-down armrests.

Rides like a car, not a truck or SUV

On the road, the Odyssey has enough pickup from its 3.5-liter V6 248-horsepower engine to swim among the dreaded SUVs, sports cars, sleek sedans and racy convertibles, all of which are clearly snubbing this bottom feeder of the automotive world, this scullery maid. No matter. The ride is smooth, the fuel mileage is not too bad (19/28 mpg, city/highway) and the view is panoramic and airy. And it rides like a car, not a truck or an SUV. The upper trim levels of Odyssey sport a six-speed automatic transmission, while the lesser levels get a five-speed. Prices range from $28,675 for the LX van to $44,025 for the Touring Elite. Predictably, the more you pay, the more the comfort level and the more gizmos you get. The Touring Elite, for example, had pull-up sunshades built into the second- and third-row side windows, heated seats, automatic HVAC and “heated power door mirrors.” If you think about the rudimentary requirements of a minivan – hauling people, cargo, groceries – many of these optional extras aren’t really necessary. All you really need is the shell of the van, along with the seats, the engine and the transmission. But marketing being what it is, buyers will usually opt for the upscale model.

Honda isn’t the only one in the game, however, and there are other choices. Perhaps Honda’s closest competitor is Toyota’s Sienna and, unlike Honda, the Sienna can be had with optional all-wheel-drive. There are also Chrysler Town and Country, Kia Sedona, Nissan Quest and Mazda5.

But the Odyssey does do what it sets out to do – somehow it makes a successful marriage of all-out practicality (and all the mundane attributes of practicality) and civilized road-going car-like comfort. And that isn’t all bad.

One more thing: the 2014 Odyssey is the only minivan to offer an optional vacuum cleaner so you can suck up all those spilled Cheerios and cookie crumbs. Clean sweep.